Tomaso's Fortune

________________________________________________
Title:     Tomaso's Fortune
Author: Henry Seton Merriman [More Titles by Merriman]

"You talk of poor men, Senora--then you talk of me. See, I have nothing but the wits that are under my hat."

And Felipe Fortis spread himself out on the trellis-bordered bench of the little Venta that stands at the junction of the Valdemosa Road and the new road from Miramar to Palma in the island of Majorca.

Felipe was, of course, known to be a young man of present position and future prospects, or he would not have said such a thing. It was supposed, indeed, by some, to be a great condescension that he should stop at the little Venta of the Break of Day and take his half of wine on market-days. And, of course, there were women who eagerly sought the woman in it, and said that Felipe drank the widow Navarro's sour wine to the bright eyes of the widow's daughter.

"No such luck for her," said Rosa's cousins and aunts, who were dotted all up the slopes of the valley on either side in their little stone cottages; right up from the river to the Val d'Erraha-- that sunny valley of repose which lies far above the capital of Majorca, far above the hum of life and sound of the restless sea.

Felipe, who was a good-looking young fellow, threw his hat down on the bench beside him. He had fair hair and a white skin--both, he understood, much admired by the dark-eyed daughters of the Baleares. He shook his finger with a playful condescension at the widow Navarro, with whom he was always kind enough to exchange a few light pleasantries. And she, womanlike, suited her fire to the calibre of the foe, for she was an innkeeper.

"That is all--the wits that are under my hat," he repeated.

And Rosa, who was standing in the deep shadow of the doorway, muttered to herself -

"Then you are indeed a poor man."

Felipe glanced towards her, and wondered whether the sun was shining satisfactorily through the trellis on his fair hair.

Rosa looked at him with inscrutable eyes--deep as velvet, grave and meditative. She was slight and girlish, with dull blue-black hair, and a face that might have been faithfully cut on a cameo. It was the colour of a sun-burnt peach, and usually wore that air of gentle pride which the Moors seem to have left behind them in those lands through which they passed, to the people upon whom they have impressed an indelible mark. But when she smiled, which was not often, her lips tilted suddenly at the corners in a way to make an old man young and a young man mad.

Tomaso of the Mill, who sat on the low wall across the road in the shadow of a great fig-tree, was watching with steady eyes. Tomaso was always watching Rosa. He had watched for years. She had grown up under that steady eye. And now, staring into the deep shadow of the cottage interior, he thought that he saw Rosa smile upon Felipe. And Felipe, of course, concluded that she was smiling at him. They all did that. And only Rosa knew the words she had whispered respecting the gallant Felipe.

Tomaso of the Mill was a poor man if you like, and usually considered a dull one to boot. He only had the mill half-way up the hill to the Val d'Erraha--a mill to which no grist came now that there was steam communication between Palma and Barcelona, and it paid better to ship the produce of the island to the mainland, buying in return the adulterated produce of the Barcelona mills. Tomaso's father had been a prosperous man almost to the day of his death, but times had moved on, leaving Tomaso and his mill behind. And there is no man who watches the times move past him with a prouder silence than a Spaniard. The mill hardly brought in ten pesetas a month now, and that was from friends--poor men like himself who were yet gentlemen, and found some carefully worded reason why they preferred home-milled flour. Tomaso, moreover, was deadly simple: there is nothing more fatal than simplicity in these days. It never occurred to him to sell his mill, or let it fall in ruins and go elsewhere for work. His world had always been bounded on the south by the Val d'Erraha, on the north by the Valdemosa road, on the west by the sea, and on the east by Rosa. He had never suffered from absolute hunger, and nothing but absolute hunger will make a Spaniard leave his home. So Tomaso of the Mill remained at the mill, and, like his forefathers, only repaired the sluices and conduit when the water-supply was no longer heavy enough to drive the creaking wheel.

Since the death of his mother he had lived alone, cooking his own food, washing his own clothes, and no man in the valley wore a whiter shirt. As to the food, perhaps there was not too much of it, or it may have been badly cooked; for Tomaso had a lean and hungry look, and his tanned cheek had diagonal lines drawn from the cheek- bone to the corner of the clean-shaven mouth. The lips were firm, the chin was long. It was a solemn face that looked out from beneath the shadow of the great fig-tree. And--there was no mistaking it--it was the face of that which the world calls a gentleman.

Felipe turned towards him in his good-natured grand way, and invited him by a jerk of the head to come and partake of his half-bottle of Majorcan wine. There was a great gulf between these two men, for Tomaso wore no jacket and Felipe was never seen without one. Tomaso therefore accepted the invitation with a grave courtesy. Felipe knew his manners also. He poured a few drops into his own glass, for fear the cork should have left a grain of dust, and then filled his guest's little thick tumbler to the brim. They touched glasses gravely and drank, Felipe making a swinging gesture towards Rosa in the dark doorway before raising the glass to his lips.

"And affairs at the mill?" inquired Felipe, with a movement of the hand demanding pardon if the subject should be painful.

"The wheel is still," replied Tomaso, with that grand air of indifference with which Spain must eventually go to the wall. He slowly unrolled and re-rolled a cheap cigarette, and sat down on the bench opposite to Felipe.

Felipe looked at him with that bright and good-natured smile which was known to be so deadly. He spread out his arms in a gesture of lofty indifference.

"What will you?" he asked, with a laugh. "It will come--your fortune."

And Tomaso smiled gravely. He was quite convinced also, in his simple way, that his fortune would come; for it had been predicted by a gipsy from Granada at the Trinity Fair on the little crowded market-place at Palma. The prediction had caught the popular fancy. Tomaso's poverty, it must be remembered, was a proverb all over the island. "As poor as Tomaso of the Mill," the people said; it being understood that a church mouse failed to suggest such destitution. Moreover, the gipsy foretold that Tomaso should make his own fortune with his own two hands, which added to the joke, for no one in Majorca is guilty of such manual energy as will lead to more than a sufficiency.

"Now, I say," continued Felipe, turning to the widow with that unconscious way of discussing some one who happens to be present which is only understood in Southern worlds. "Now, I say that when it comes, it will have something to do with horses. See how he sits in the saddle!"

And Felipe sketched perfection with a little gesture of his brown hand, which was generous of Felipe; for Tomaso was (by one of those strange chances which lead the Spaniards to say that God gives nuts to those who have no teeth) a born horseman, and sat in the saddle like a god--one straight line from heel to shoulder.

Tomaso had risen from the bench and walked slowly across the road to his former seat on the low wall. He was a shy and rather modest man, and felt, perhaps, that there was a suggestion of condescension in Felipe's attitude. If Felipe had come here to pay his addresses to Rosa, he, Tomaso, was not the man to put difficulties in the way. For he was one of those rare men who, in loving, place themselves in the background. He loved Rosa, in a word, better than he loved himself. And in the solitude of his life at the mill he had worked out a grim problem in his own mind. He had weighed himself carefully in the balance, nothing extenuating. He had taken as precise a measure of Felipe Fortis with his present position and his future prospects. And, of course, the only solution was that Rosa would do well to marry Felipe. So Tomaso withdrew to the outer side of the road and the shade of the fig-tree, while Felipe talked gaily with Rosa's mother, and Rosa looked on from the doorway with deep, dark eyes that said nothing at all. For Felipe was wooing the daughter through the mother, as men have often done before him; and the widow smiled on Felipe's suit. The whole business, it appeared, was to be conducted in a sane and gentlemanly way, over a half of the widow's wine, with clinking glasses and a grave politeness. And, of course, Felipe had it all his own way. The question of rivalry did not so much as suggest itself to him, so he could the more easily be kind to the quiet man with the steady eyes who withdrew with such tact when he had finished his wine.

Of course, there was Tomaso's fortune to take into consideration. No one seemed to think of doubting that the prediction must eventually come true, but it was hardly likely to be verified in time to convert Tomaso into a serious rival to Felipe Fortis. There were assuredly no fortunes to be made out of the half-ruined mill. The trade had left that for ever. There was no money in the whole valley, and Tomaso did not seem disposed to go and seek it elsewhere. He passed his time between the mill and the low wall opposite the Venta of the Break of Day, of which the stones beneath the fig-tree were polished with his constant use of them. He usually came down from the mill, which is a mile above the Venta, as any one may prove who seeks the Valley of Repose to-day, by the new road recently cut on the hillside by a spasmodically active Town Council--the road from Miramar to Palma.

It had been at one time supposed that Tomaso's fortune would come to him through this new road, for the construction of which a portion of the land attached to the mill must be purchased. But it was a very small portion, and the purchase-money a ridiculous little sum, which was immediately swallowed up in repairs to the creaking wheel. The road-makers, however, turned aside the stream below the mill, and conducted it to a chasm in the rock, where it fell a great height to a tunnel beneath the road. And half the valley said they could not sleep for the sound of it, and the other half said they liked it. And Rosa, whose bedroom window was nearer to it than any other in the valley, said nothing at all.

Sitting beneath the fig-tree, Tomaso looked up suddenly towards the mill. He was so much accustomed to the roar of his own mill-stream that his ears never heeded it, and heard through it softer and more distant sounds. He heard something now--the regular beat of trotting horses on the road far above his home. He looked up towards the heights, though, of course, he could see nothing through the pines, which are thickly planted here and almost as large as the pines of Vizzavona, in the island of Corsica. He listened to the sound with that quiet interest which comes to those who live in constant sunshine, and is in itself nearly akin to indifference.

"What is it?" asked the widow, noting his attitude.

"It is a carriage on the new road--some traveller from Miramar."

Travellers from Miramar were few and far between. None had as yet made use of the new road. This was, therefore, a matter of considerable interest to the four persons idling away the afternoon at the Venta of the Break of Day.

"The horses will as likely as not take fright at the new waterfall made by these mules of road-makers," said Tomaso, rising slowly and throwing away the end of his cigarette.

He took his stand in the middle of the road, looking uphill with a gleam of interest in his eyes. He knew horses so well that his opinion arrested the attention of his hearers. Tomaso had always said that the diversion of his mill-stream would be dangerous to the traffic on the new road. But it was nobody's business to consult Tomaso.

He stood in the middle of the road, contemplatively biting his lower lip--a lean, lithe man, who had lived a clean and simple life--and never dreamt that this might be his fortune trotting down the new Miramar road towards him.

"Ah!" he exclaimed, curtly.

The steady pace was suddenly broken, and at the same moment the hollow roar of the wheels told that the carriage was passing over the little tunnel through which the stream escaped to the valley below. Then came the clatter of frightened horses and the broken cry of one behind them. Felipe leapt to his feet and stood irresolute. The widow gave a little cry of fear, and Rosa came out into the sunlight. There the three stood, rigid, watching Tomaso contemplatively biting his lip in the middle of the sun-lit road.

In a moment the suspense was over--the worst was realized. A carriage swung round the corner a quarter of a mile higher up the road, with two horses stretched at a frantic gallop, and the driver had no reins in his hand; for his reins had broken, and the loose ends fluttered on either side. He was stooping forward, with his right hand at the screw-brake between his legs, and in his left hand he swung his heavy whip. He was a brave man, at all events, for he kept his nerve and tried to guide the horses with his whip. There was just a bare chance that he might reach the Venta, but below it-- not a hundred yards below it--the road turned sharply to the right, and everything failing to take that sharp turn would leap into space and the rocky bed of the river five hundred feet below.

The man gave a shout as he came round the corner, and to his credit it was always remembered that his gesture waved Tomaso aside. But Tomaso stood in the middle of the road, and his steady eyes suddenly blazed with a fierce excitement. His lips were apart. He was breathless, and Rosa found herself with her two hands at her throat, watching him.

The carriage seemed to bear right down upon him, but he must have stepped aside, for it passed on and left the road clear. Tomaso was somewhat in the dust, in the confusion of tossing heads and flying reins. Then his white shirt appeared against the black of the horses' manes.

"Name of God!" cried Felipe; "he is on top!"

And Felipe Fortis forgot his fine clothes and superior manners. He was out on the road in an instant, running as he never ran before, and shouting a hundred Catalonian oaths which cannot be transcribed here, even in Catalonian.

It was difficult to see what happened during these moments which were just those instants of time in which one man does well and another badly. But Rosa and her mother saw at length that Tomaso was apparently half standing on the pole between the two horses. He was swinging and jerking from side to side, but all the while he was gathering the scattered reins in his hands. Then suddenly he threw himself back, and the horses' heads went up as if they were being strangled. They jerked and tugged in vain. Tomaso's arms were like steel. Already the pace was slackening--the gallop was broken. And a minute later the carriage was at a standstill in the ditch.

Already the driver was on the ground explaining excitedly to Tomaso how it had happened, and Tomaso was smiling gravely as he wiped some blood from his hand. It was Felipe who, arriving at this moment, thought of opening the carriage-door. There was a pause while Felipe looked into the carriage, and Rosa and her mother ran towards him. Rosa helped Felipe to assist an old man to alight. He was a very fat man, with grey and flaccid cheeks, with shiny black hair and a good deal of gold chain and ring about him. He seemed only half-conscious of the assistance proffered to him, and walked slowly across the road to the shade of the trees. Here he sat down on the low wall, with his elbows on his knees, his two hands to his head, and looked thoughtfully at the ground between his feet. It was precisely the attitude of one who has had a purler at football. And the others looked on in the waiting silence which usually characterizes such moments.

"The gentleman is not hurt?" suggested Felipe, who was always affable and ready with his tongue.

But the gentleman was not prepared to confirm this optimistic view of the case. He simply sat staring at the ground between his feet. At length he lifted his head and looked Felipe slowly up and down.

"Who stopped the horses?" he asked. "A man in a white shirt."

"It was Tomaso of the Mill," answered the widow, who would have spoken sooner if she had had her breath. "He washes his own," she added, anxious to say a good word for a neighbour.

Tomaso should, of course, have come forward and bowed. But Tomaso's manners were not of a showy description. He was helping the driver to repair the reins, and paused at this moment to remove the perspiration from his forehead with two fingers, which he subsequently wiped on the seam of his trousers.

"He!" cried the fat man sitting on the wall.

One could see that he was a business man; for he had the curt manner of the counting-house.

"He, Tomaso!" added the widow Navarro, in a shrill voice.

And Tomaso came slowly forward.

"Your name?" said the man of business.

"Tomaso."

"Tomaso what?"

"Tomaso of the Mill." And his face fell a little when the fat man produced a pocket-book and wrote the name down with a shaking hand. The action rather savoured of the police and the law, and Tomaso did not like it.

The stout man leant forward with his chin in the palm of his hand and reflected for some moments. He was singularly reflective, and seemed to be making a mental calculation.

"See here," he said at length, looking at Tomaso with quick business-like eyes. He was beginning to recover his colour now. "See here, I am not going to give you money--between gentlemen, eh! such things are not done. You have saved my life. Good! You are a brave man, and you risked your neck for a perfect stranger! I happen to be a rich man, and my life is of some value. I came from Barcelona to Majorca on business--business with a good profit. If I had gone over there"--he paused, and jerked his thumb towards the blue and hazy space that lay below them--"the transaction would have fallen through. You have enabled me, by your prompt action, to return to Palma this evening and sign the papers connected with this affair. Good! You are therefore entitled to a commission on the profit that I shall make. I have reckoned it out. It amounts to ten thousand pesetas--a modest fortune, eh?"

Tomaso nodded his head. He had always known that it would come. The widow Navarro threw up her eyes, and in a whisper called the attention of her own special black-letter saint to this business. Rosa was glancing surreptitiously at Felipe, who, to do him justice, was smiling on the old man with much appreciation.

"You see what I am," continued the man of business, tapping his exuberant waistcoat; "I am fat and I am sixty-seven. When I return to Palma, I shall notify to a lawyer that I leave to you, 'Tomaso of the Mill,' ten thousand pesetas, to be paid as soon after my death as possible. At Barcelona I shall put the matter into legal form with my own notary there."

He rose from his seat on the wall and held out his thick white hand, which Tomaso took, and they shook hands gravely.

"As between gentlemen, eh?" said he; "as between gentlemen."

Then he walked slowly to the other side of the road, where the driver was engaged in drawing his carriage out of the ditch.

"I will enter your malediction of a carriage," he said, "but you must lead the horses to the bottom of the hill."

The carriage went slowly on its way, while the others, after watching it turn the corner, returned to the Venta. In the twinkling of an eye Tomaso's fortune had come. And he had won it with his own hands, precisely as the gipsy from Granada had predicted. The tale, moreover, is true, and any one can verify it who will take the trouble to go to Palma de Mallorca, where half a dozen independent witnesses heard the prediction made at a stall in the crowded and narrow market-place nearly six months before the new Miramar road was completed.

As it was getting dusk, Felipe Fortis mounted his horse and rode on to his home in the valley far down the Valdemosa road. And Tomaso, with his handkerchief bound round his hand, walked thoughtfully up to his solitary home. The great problem which he had thought out so carefully and brought to so grim and certain a conclusion had suddenly been reopened. And Rosa had noticed with the quickness of her sex that Tomaso had carefully avoided looking at her from the moment that his good fortune had been made known. His manner, as he bade mother and daughter a gruff good-night was rather that of a malefactor than one who had just done a meritorious action, and Rosa watched him go with an odd little wise smile tilting the corners of her lips.

"Goodnight," she said. "You--and your fortune."

And Tomaso turned the words over and over in his mind a hundred times, and could make nothing of them.

Rosa was early astir the next morning, and happened to be at the open door when Tomaso came down the road. He was wearing his best hat--a flat-brimmed black felt--which, no doubt, the girl noticed, for it is by the piecing together of such trifles that women hold their own in this world. There was otherwise no change in Tomaso's habiliments, which consisted, as usual, of dark trousers, a white shirt, and a dark-blue faja or waistcloth.

"Where are you going?" cried Rosa, stepping out into the sunlight with a haste called forth, perhaps, by the suspicion that Tomaso would fain have passed by unnoticed.

He stopped, his bronzed face a deeper red, his steady eyes wavering for once. But he did not come towards the Venta, which stands on the higher side of the road.

"I am going down to Palma--to make sure."

"Of your fortune?" inquired Rosa, looking at the cup she was drying with the air of superior knowledge which so completely puzzled the simple Tomaso.

"Yes," he answered, slowly turning on his heel as if to continue his journey.

"And then--?" asked Rosa.

He looked up inquiringly.

"When you have made sure of your precious fortune?" she explained.

She had raised her hand to her hair, and was standing in a very pretty, indifferent attitude. Tomaso held his lower lip between his teeth as he looked at her.

"I don't know what I shall do with it," he answered, and, turning, he walked hurriedly down the sun-lit road.

"Come in on your way back and tell us about it," she called out after him, and then stood watching him until he turned the corner where he had picked up his fortune on the road the day before.

It was characteristic of the man that he never turned to look at her, and the girl gave a little nod of the head as he disappeared. She had apparently expected him not to look back, and yet wanted him to do it, and at the same time would rather he did not do it. Felipe Fortis would have turned half a dozen times, with a salutation and a wave of the hat.

But the sun went down behind the tableland of the Val d'Erraha and Tomaso did not return. Then the moon rose, large and yellow, beyond the Valdemosa Heights, and the widow Navarro, her day's work done, walked slowly up the road to visit her sister, the road-keeper's wife. Rosa sat on the bench beneath the trellis, and thought those long thoughts that belong to youth. She heard Tomaso's step long before he came in sight, for the valley is thinly populated and as still as Sahara. He was walking slowly, and dragged his feet as if fatigued. The moon was now well up, and the girl could distinguish Tomaso's gleaming white shirt as he turned the corner. As he approached he kept on the left-hand side of the road. It was evident that he intended to call at the Venta.

"He--Tomaso!" cried Rosa, when he was almost at the steps.

"He--Rosa!" he answered.

"I am all alone," said Rosa. "Mother has gone to see Aunt Luisa. Have you your fortune in your pocket?"

He came up the steps and leant against the trellis, looking down at her. She could not see his face, but a woman does not always need to do that.

"What is it--Tomaso?" she asked gravely.

"That poor man," he explained simply--for the Spaniards hold human life but cheaply--"was found dead in his carriage when they reached Palma. The doctors say it was the shock--and he so fat. At all events he is dead."

Rosa crossed herself mechanically, and devoutly thought first of all of the merchant's future state.

"His last action was a good one," she said. "There is that to remember."

"Yes," said Tomaso, in a queer voice. And at the sound Rosa looked up at him sharply; but she could see nothing, for his face was in the shadow.

"And as for you," she said tentatively, "you will get your fortune all the sooner."

"I shall never get it at all," answered Tomaso, with a curt laugh. "I went down to Palma this morning with my head full of plans--in the sunshine. I came back with an empty brain--in the dark."

He stood motionless, looking down at her. They are slow of tongue in Majorca, and Rosa reflected for quite a minute before she spoke-- which is saying a good deal for a woman.

"Tell me," she said at length, gently, "why is it that you will not get your fortune?"

"I went to the notary and told him what had happened, what the merchant had said, and who had heard him--and the notary laughed. 'Where is your paper?' he asked; and, of course, I had no paper. I went to another notary, and at last I saw the Alcalde. 'You should have asked for a paper properly signed,' he said. But no gentleman could have asked for that."

"No," replied Rosa, rather doubtfully.

"I found the driver of the carriage," continued Tomaso, "and took him to the Alcalde, but that was no better. The Alcalde and the notaries laughed at us. Such a story, they said, would make any lawyer laugh."

"But there is Felipe Fortis, who heard it too."

"Yes," answered Tomaso, in a hollow voice, "there is Felipe Fortis. He was in Palma, and I found him at the cafe. But he said he had not time to come to the Alcalde with me then, and he was sure that if he did it would be useless."

"Ah!" said Rosa.

She got up and walked to the edge of the terrace, looking down into the moonlit valley in silence for some minutes. Then she came slowly back, and stood before him looking up into his face. He was head and shoulders above her.

"So your fortune is gone?" she said. And the moonlight shining on her face betrayed the presence of that fleeting wise smile which Tomaso had noticed more than once with wonder.

"Yes--it is gone. And there is an end of it."

"Of what?" asked Rosa.

"Oh!--of everything," replied Tomaso, with a grim stoicism.

Rosa stood looking at him for a moment. Then she took two deliberate steps forward and leant against him just as he was leaning against the trellis, as if he had been a tree or something solid and reliable of that sort. She laid her cheek, of a deeper colour than a sunburnt peach, against his white shirt. In a sort of parenthesis of thought she took a sudden, half-maternal interest in the middle button of his shirt, tested it, and found it more firmly fixed than she had supposed. Her dusky hair just brushed his chin.

"Then you are nothing but a stupid," she said.

[The end]
Henry Seton Merriman's short story: Tomaso's Fortune

________________________________________________



GO TO TOP OF SCREEN